Tagged with NHS

Saving the NHS: What has improved in Labour’s health policy?

Labour should always be proud of creating the NHS. No less, creating it in “the aftermath of war and national bankruptcy” as our 2017 manifesto states. Labour will always be the party to save the NHS, but in recent elections it has not been able to save the Labour Party.

The Conservatives leading hospitals into deficit and missing target after target doesn’t swing everyone to the left as some might hope.

The Labour Party in recent history has fallen short of  offering the necessary solution of an injection of funding and a long term strategy – allowing the right to offer their own ‘answers’. Right-wing media and UKIP have been able to dominate the debate with ideas of privatisation, while blaming long-term users of the NHS and immigrants. Continue reading →

Diane Abbott: Vote Labour to Save Our NHS

Vote Labour to Save Our NHS

By Diane Abbott MP

One of the clearest issues at stake in the upcoming General Election will be the very future of our NHS, and the differences between Labour and the Tories on this issue couldn’t be clearer.

Tory austerity has meant that the NHS has been stretched to its limits this winter, with wards closed, operations cancelled and treatments delayed.

The government is driving through £22 billion in cuts by 2020. Alongside this, in a clear false economy, cuts to social care mean more and more patients languish in hospitals. There is a huge knock-on effect on the NHS, where each year more older people are finding themselves trapped in hospital, simply because there isn’t the care available for them. Continue reading →

Save our NHS!

Disaster-looms-for-NHS_large-e1308062563878The crisis in the NHS has reached a new level in recent weeks, yet Teresa May and Jeremy Hunt are burying their head in the sand, even criticising the Red Cross for declaring a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the NHS, with the Prime Minister saying the claims were “irresponsible.”

As Labour activists, we need to be clear that this Government has helped to create the crisis in the NHS, which is facing the biggest financial squeeze in its history, and by 2018 NHS spending per head will be falling. Continue reading →

Our understaffed underfunded NHS is the result of government ideology

Disaster-looms-for-NHS_large-e1308062563878-2Jeremy Hunt had few answers from the barrage of cross bench concern this week’s parliamentary debates on the NHS funding and the impact of Brexit on the NHS.

When asked what he was doing to ensure that the NHS gets the £350million a week that it was promised during the Leave referendum campaign, the Secretary of State said “I am a little stumped, because I was never really sure whether we would see that money.”

The government’s health policy is utterly incoherent. The Leave half of the government is promising millions of pounds to the health service while the Remain side knows full well that that money will be unavailable in the economic chaos wrought by Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

Financial problems may only be the half of it. The vote for Brexit and Tory talk of an Australian-style point system leave question marks over the status of the 100,000 EU nationals that work in, and prop up, our health and care system.

Continue reading →

Tories’ pre-election fantasising comes back to haunt them

Osborne Liar LiarNorthern powerhouse deflates into Northern power-cut. It was so hurriedly propagated by Osborne before the election as portraying the government as dynamic innovators of English devolution, but none of the details had been properly worked through, including the required transport infrastructure as we now know. So the election gimmick, if not evaporated, has dimmed at least to the long haul. Just 7 weeks after the election when the Tories boasted of the biggest investment in the railways since Victorian times, the grand 5-year £38.5bn plan has collapsed, with the government trying to dump the blame on Network Rail. The Tories are all the more culpable since they still vaunted their grandiose plans in their election manifesto though Network Rail admitted “very early on last year” that the 5-year plan would be ‘incredibly difficult to deliver’. Continue reading →